Access and MDB file from Linux

Rails
1

I need to get read only access to a MDB database accessed from a Linux
box using samba, anyone had any luck with this and know how to set it
up?

Please resist from posting your reasons why and MDB should not be used,
I am the converted so stop preaching. The MDB is there to stay and I
have to read to it.

thanks

2

Hi Craig,
All rails supported adapters are listed here:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/DatabaseDrivers
as you will see, MDB is not one of them (and not in the require list
either)

3

If you’re feeling adventurous you could go with jruby on rails, the
java-ness gives it access to ActiveRecord-jdbc which I imagine can read
mdb.

Fred

4

Check out mdbtools:

http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/

It’s read-only access for now, but that appears to be what you need.
There is a converter from MDB to other DBs, and a simple SQL engine for
basic queries. Depending on the size of your database, you could
possibly dump the mdb to MySQL (or whatever your Rails db is), and then
create some kind of sync.

Alternatively, you could automate some kind of dump on the Windows side
(if that’s available) to CSV’s (or a delimited txt format), and then
read those in from your samba-connected Linux box.

5

You might give ActiveMDB a try.

It requires that you compile the MDB Tools Curtis S. mentioned, but
then it gives you an ActiveRecord-ish wrapper around them.

weblog: http://www.automatthew.com/
rdoc: http://activemdb.rubyforge.org/activemdb
rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/activemdb/